Vegetarian Manifesto, first draft

It may seem like a rash decision, but the other day I became a vegetarian. I had never really given much thought to the option of being a vegetarian at all before in my life. I had previously thought that it would be fairly easy for me to avoid meat since I have never been a big meat eater, but I never thought I would feel the need to not eat animals. I have known that there are ethical issues involved with eating meat, otherwise why would so many people decide be vegetarians? But, I have also known that almost every food that we buy from the grocery store has been produced in ethically questionable ways. In reality, unless I only eat food I grow in a garden at my house or buy from a local small-scale farmer, my diet will inevitably consist of foods that are grown or processed in ways that somehow hurt others. Since I have known this to be true, I have chosen not to think about my food choices in terms of how they were made. I have usually chosen instead to ignore the ethics of my food. I have been able to choose to eat in ignorance quite easily for my whole life. This does not mean that I have never eaten anything grown in my backyard or bought at a farmer’s market, but I have never exclusively chosen to eat these foods over the foods bought from commercial producers in a store. I have never really eaten by any kind of distinct guideline before.

I believe I have never considered vegetarianism because while I knew that the animals raised for humans to consume live in inhumane conditions I never really had to see their conditions and actually address the problem. The problem was never visible to me so I didn’t have to fully recognize it. Although this is not the right way to view any problem, to ignore something just because it isn’t visible, I still did this. The problem did become visible to me however after watching the short documentary called Food Inc in writing class. After seeing real cases of the methods involved in meat production I had to acknowledge that animal cruelty in regards to food production is an issue that is not completely ignorable. The hourish long documentary showed vivid images of still living cows hanging by their feet on a production line, chickens barely able to move because of malnutrition, and a group of pigs being crushed by a large piece of metal. While some people may have been able to push these images aside, after watching the movie I really was not interested in eating one of those animals forced to live in misery and killed in very inhumane ways. This is how I became a vegetarian two weeks ago in writing class.

Although my conversion was based largely on emotion, there are many rational arguments for vegetarianism. There are arguments surrounding not only the animal’s, but also the worker’s, rights to humane treatment and freedoms. There are also scientific health reasons to avoid eating meat. You only have to look at the food pyramids that have been produced over the years to see that smaller and smaller portions of meat, especially red meat, have been recommended for a healthy diet in the more recent years. There are even arguments proposing that universal vegetarianism would help combat global warming by reducing the harmful effects that the meat industry has on the environment.

In Michael Pollan’s article, “An Animal’s Place,” Pollan discusses his reactions to Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” and his views around the treatment of animals. Pollan took a slightly different approach than I did when faced with addressing the issue of animal treatment. While reading Singer’s book and thinking about animal rights he was sitting down to eat a steak; he addresses the irony of this, calling it “a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion).” Pollan questions some of the fundamental arguments against eating meat. He notes, for example, that rights for animals and rights for people must be looked at differently because we are biologically different and that predation is a naturally occurring phenomenon. In regards to these differences in rights I think one of the more important quotes from the article is this: “The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of what abilities they may possess.’” This quote suggests that just because a chicken does not have the capabilities that a human has, it should still be free from pain and suffering and free to participate in any lifestyle that it wants to rather than be forced to live in awful conditions. I agree with Pollan when he later discusses the idea that the inhumane treatment of animals for consumption purposes is a fairly new occurrence, and has become a big problem because of the way production plants are run. I like Pollan’s idea of being a “humanocarnivore” because I do not think that eating all meat is wrong or unnatural, but I believe the meat and poultry industries act inhumanely and do not want to support their actions.

I also do not want to support the meat and poultry industries because they not only remove animals’ freedoms to a happy and healthy life, but these industries can be extremely unhealthy for the workers as well. The article “Foul Trouble” by Christopher D. Cook discusses the dangers found in poultry production plants for the workers. The workers are at risk of disease through exposure to salmonella, bacteria, and blood, cuts from the birds or the tools they use. I found it to be very disturbing that in some plants the workers have to kill the birds themselves by hand. Another disturbing fact Cook brought up was that “OSHA also found that most employees in the plants it surveyed were required to buy their own protective boots, gloves, and aprons, necessities that many poultry workers- who typically earn only $6.50 an hour- simply did without.” Not only are these workers underpaid, they are not even given protective gear to attempt to avoid the many diseases and injuries that their jobs put them at risk for.

Aside from the health and happiness of the people and animals involved in the production and the eating of meat, the industry’s effect on the environment, and on the world food supply, are extremely significant. The amounts of carbon dioxide and methane that raising and processing animals requires are excessive. The article, “Fight Global Warming by Going Vegetarian,” gives a statistic that in itself proves the inefficiency of the industry: “Producing one calorie from animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel input- releasing 11 times as much carbon dioxide- as does producing a calorie from plant protein.” Pan et al also discuss the environmental impact of the industry stating that “the animal agribusiness generates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation alone.”  As we have been attempting to solve global warming by using public transportation, switching to more energy efficient light bulbs or buying hybrid cars, the meat industry has been contributing to the issue and many people have not had any idea to what extent. The inefficiency of the industry is hurting the environment by taking up huge amounts of land, causing deforestation, and emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses and this seems to me like another very good reason to avoid eating meat.

After researching the issue further, I know there are many more reasons behind being vegetarian besides the emotional reasons for which I decided to try vegetarianism. I do not believe that people should never eat meat, or even that I should never eat meat if it was humanely raised and killed, but that the meat and poultry industries as they exist today are wrong. They are contributing to too many moral and global injustices for me to support. I also know that these industries are not the only ones doing harmful things, the seed industry for example hurts many farmers, but choosing to acknowledge this one issue is at least a start. I think the industry could be reformed drastically to continue to cater to people’s eating needs but in a much more humane way. In the article, “Is Universal Vegetarianism Feasable,” Professor A. E. Taylor argues that it would be impossible for the whole world to become vegetarian simply because we do not have the technology to produce enough plant calories agriculturally to feed the entire world. While this may be true, I think that we could at least decrease the amount of animals consumed since we have learned that meat consumption should not be a huge part of our diets. With a decreased need for meat these huge plants that are inhumanely raising and killing animals could be replaced with smaller farms which treat their animals as living beings and not as items on a production line. This might not happen anytime soon however, so being vegetarian, or at least what Pollan would call a “humanocarnivore” seems like the best way to avoid being a part of the damaging meat industry.